Ninja friends

Nakama trades in chunky, simple violence. There are two buttons to move, one to attack, and one to jump. With these you need to weave a path of slaughter through a cabal of stocky little enemies, each intent on chipping away your life bar.

The game is cut up into minuscule, manageable chunks of no more than a few minutes. You smack some low-level ninja, then face off against a deadly boss who's holding one of your friends hostage. Defeat the boss and your friend will help you in the rest of your quest.

Sword play

The game looks pretty good, and while its blocky graphics are never breathtaking, they give a solid sense of place to the frantic action. While the controls are simple, there's a hardcore edge to Nakama as well.

You'll need to be as fast with your dodges as you are with your slashes if you want to get far, and while the minion enemies dole out generous helpings of extra life when you've killed them, the bosses are much tougher propositions.

Once you're dead you're dropped back to the start of the game. You can jump on a cloud to pick up from the start of the last level you played, or start the whole thing over again. Your allies regenerate at the start of each play-through as well.

Nakama piles on the difficulty pretty quickly, but while the bosses have some interesting new ideas the tougher enemy sets are usually just tougher versions of people you've killed already. There's a lack of innovation in your moves, too, and eventually everything gets pretty repetitive.

Stabby

There's fun to be had here, but it doesn't last for very long. If you do break through the difficulty barrier, you're faced with another little slog to the next bit of the game which has any real innovation in it.

The violence in Nakama is well put-together, and there's a highscore-chasing core that makes you want to keep playing, but in the end there's just not enough variation to really keep you interested for very long.